LEFT BEHIND

In the spring of 2018, Europe recoiled after the brutal murder of a Slovakian journalist in the safety of his own home. From London to Riga, men and women congregated to hold candle-lit vigils for the young man; in the streets of the Slovakian capital, crowds marched to protest the terrible injustice of the murder of someone who was attempting to expose corruption of the local government, and esteemed newspapers contemplated the nature of the right to free speech. Yet just shortly before that, a political murder of another Russian journalist was treated with pity, but also acceptance: those things just happen, went the general consensus. And the fates of many other men and women living under authoritarian regimes in the Middle East or Caucasus went largely unnoticed: if they were reported at all, no one was really surprised. For these people, political murders and persecution became expected: normal, even. This shocking indifference to human rights violation of particular groups of people exposes the hypocrisy of our current society: and what is more, it is actually a dangerous precedent to set. In this essay, I will first examine the notion of universal community as in today’s globalised world. After that, I will proceed to argue that although we should understand human-rights as a man-made construct, it does not mean they are any less real than if we were to conceptualise them as a natural fact of human existence. I shall continue with an observation regarding the relative value of human rights as it is currently often understood in the Western society, and argue that this approach fundamentally undermines the notion of equality and devaluates the importance of human rights to our society because of its nature as an artificial construct. Finally, I shall argue that this hypocrisy results in relativization of universal morality and weakens the integrity of Western society.